Archive for the ‘cinf’ tag

I’m pleased to announce that the ACS Division of Chemical Information will be hosting a series of free webinars on topics related to chemical information. The webinars will be open to everybody and our first speaker in this series will be Dr. Alex Clark, who’ll be talking about cheminformatics workflows and mobile applications. More details below or at http://www.acscinf.org/about/news/20120918.php

Abstract

In recent years smartphones and tablets have attained sufficient power and sophistication to replace conventional desktop and laptop computers for many tasks. Chemistry software is late to the party, but rapidly catching up. This webinar will explore some of the cheminformatics functionality that can currently be performed using mobile apps. A number of workflow scenarios will be discussed, such as: creating and maintaining chemical data (molecules, reactions, numbers & text); searching chemical databases and utilising the results; structure-aware lab notebooks; visualisation and structure-activity analysis; property calculation using remote webservices; and a multitude of ways to share data collaboratively, and integrate modular apps within distributed and heterogeneous workflows.

Speaker

Alex M. Clark graduated from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, with a Ph.D. in synthetic organometallic chemistry, then went on to work in computational chemistry. His chemistry background spans both the lab bench and development of software for a broad variety of 2D and 3D computer aided molecular design algorithms and user interfaces. He is the founder of Molecular Materials Informatics, Inc., which is dedicated to producing next-generation cheminformatics software for emerging platforms such as mobile devices and cloud computing environments.

With the 2011 Fall ACS meeting coming up in Denver next month, CINF will be hosting another round of lightning talks – 8 minutes to talk about anything related to cheminformatics and chemical information. As before, these talks won’t be managed via PACS, as a result of which we are taking short abstracts between July 14 and Aug 14.We hope that we’ll get to hear about interesting and recent stuff. Remember, this is meant to be a fun event so be creative! (You can see slides from the first run of this session last year).

The full announcement is below:

For the 2011 Fall meeting in Denver (Aug 28 – Sep 1), CINF will be running an experimental session of lightning talks – short, strictly timed talks. The session does not have a specific topic, however, all talks should be related to cheminformatics and chemical information. One of the key features of this session is that we will not be using the traditional ACS abstract submission system, since that system precludes the inclusion of recent work in the program.

So, since we will be accepting abstracts directly, the expectation is that they be about recent work and developments, rather than rehashes of year-old work. In addition, talks should not be verbal versions of posters submitted for this meeting. Given the short time limits we don’t expect great detail – but we are expecting compact and informative presentations.

That’s the challenge.

What

Talks should be no longer than 8 minutes in length. At 8 minutes, you will be asked to stop.

Use as many slides as you want, as long as you can finish in 8 minutes

Talks should not be rehashes of poster presentations

Talks will run back to back, and questions & discussion will be held of off until the end

If you haven’t participated in these types of talks before here are some suggestions:

No more than three slides for a 5 minute talk (but if you can pull of 20 slides in 8 minutes, more power to you)

Avoid slides with too much text (and don’t paste PDF’s of papers!)

A single chart per slide and make sure labels are readable at a distance

When

1:30pm, Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Submissions run from July 14 to Aug 14

Where

Room 112, Colorado Convention Center

How

Send in an abstract of about 100 – 120 words to cinf.flash@gmail.com

We will let you know if you will be speaking by Aug 21 and we will need slide decks by Aug 24

Another ACS is coming up this fall in Boston. As in the past there’ll be lots of symposia in various divisions,on various topics. But common to all of them is the fact that they were submitted nearly 6 months ago and in most cases talk about work that is already published.

While the ACS meetings usually have some pretty interesting symposia and talks, it’s not always the best venue for getting breaking news. So to address this, CINF will be holding a short session consisting of lightning talks – 6 minute talks, strictly timed (think of loud bells and maybe even a fog horn) on any topic related to cheminformatics and chemical information.

Lightning talks are certainly fun (see Ignite for example). But it wouldn’t be fun if we had to hear 6 minute synopses of old work. So, for this session, we’re not going through PACS. In fact we’re going to accept submissions from July 17 to Aug 7. The expectation being that speakers are going to talk about recent developments and not rehash old work.

This is an experimental symposium, so we’ll likely have just 8 to 10 speakers. But I’m excited as this a brand new format and should be a lively session. Hopefully, the cheminformatics crowd can put on a good show! (Or as the Ignite motto states: ‘Enlighten us, but make it quick‘).

For the 2010 Fall meeting in Boston, CINF will be running an experimental session of lightning talks – short, strictly timed talks. The session does not have a specific topic, however, all talks should be related to cheminformatics and chemical information. One of the key features of this session is that we will not be using the traditional ACS abstract submission system, since that system precludes the inclusion of recent work in the program.

So, since we will be accepting abstracts directly, the expectation is that they be about recent work and developments, rather than rehashes of year-old work. In addition, talks should not be verbal versions of posters submitted for this meeting. Given the short time limits we don’t expect great detail – but we are expecting compact and informative presentations.

That’s the challenge.

What

Talks should be no longer than 6 minutes in length. At 6 minutes, you will be asked to stop.

Use as many slides as you want, as long as you can finish in 6 minutes

Talks should not be rehashes of poster presentations

Talks will run back to back, and questions & discussion will be held of off until the end

If you haven’t participated in these types of talks before here are some suggestions:

No more than three slides for a 5 minute talk (but if you can pull of 20 slides in 6 minutes, more power to you)

Avoid slides with too much text (and don’t paste PDF’s of papers!)

A single chart per slide and make sure labels are readable at a distance

When

Aug 23, 2:45 PM

Submissions run from July 17 to Aug 7

Where

Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Room 155. You can get a map of the concourse here

How

Send in an abstract of about 100 – 120 words to cinf.flash@gmail.com

We will let you know if you will be speaking by Aug 15 and we will need slide decks by Aug 20

Finally back home from another ACS National Meeting, this time in San Francisco. While the location is certainly an attraction, there was some pretty nice talks and symposia in the CINF division such as the Visualization of Chemical Data, Metabolomics and Materials Informatics. Credit for these (and all the other) symposia go to the organizers who put in a lot of effort to get an excellent line up of speakers – as evidenced by packed rooms. This time, I finally got round to visiting some of the other division – some excellent talks in MEDI. As in the past, there was a Blue Obelisk dinner, this time at La Briciola (a fantastic recommendation from Moses Hohman and the CDD crowd) where there was much good discussion. I got a Blue Obelisk Obelisk from PMR (Cameron Neylon and Alex Wade were also recipients this year).

CINF had some excellent receptions where I got to meet old faces and make some new friends – with many of whom I’ve actually had many virtual exchanges via email or Friendfeed. Here’s a picture of me and Wendy Warr from one of the receptions.

With the meeting over and most of the follow up now, I can take a bit of a break while the last few submissions for the Boston program come trickling in. And then I get down to finalizing the program for the Fall meeting. This fall, we have an excellent line up of symposia including “Data Intensive Drug Design“, “Semantic Chemistry and RDF” and “Structure Activity Landscapes“. At the Fall meeting, I’ll also be chairing a COMP symposium titled “HPC on the Cheap” where an excellent set of speakers will be focusing on various technologies that let users access high performance computing power at a fraction of the price of super computers – stuff like FPGA’s, GPU’s and distributed systems such as Hadoop. This is part of the “Scripting and Programming” series, so expect to see code on the slides!

I’d also like to let people know that in Boston, CINF will be running an experimental symposium consisting of several very short (5 minutes or 8 minutes) lightning talks. But unlike traditional ACS symposia, we’re going to open submissions to this symposia sometime in July and close about 3 or 2 weeks before the meeting itself. In other words, we’re going to be looking for recent and ongoing developments in chemical information and cheminformatics. The title and exact mechanics of this symposium – dates, submissions, reviews and the actual times, slide counts will be announced in the near future at various places. If you think the early ACS deadlines suck, consider submitting a short talk to this symposium.

Overall an excellent meeting in San Francisco and I’m already looking forward to Boston. But in the meantime, time to get back to chewing on data, and finishing up some papers, book chapters and talks.